That may have been a typo on my part. My program does write to output ok except for the fact that the double space comes out as a single space.

I'm going to ditch using the 'read' command and try using a combination of cat, grep and awk to rip through the file. If I do a :

REC_BUF=`grep '^' $1`

and then output to screen, the 2 spaces appear. Therefore I know it's a 'read' specific feature.